You think of yourself as being above your readers because you use a thesaurus (listen, this word sounds like a type of dinosaur for a reason) and reference Kafka or whatever, but it's way harder to write something clean and intelligible than it is to write something "clever" and convoluted.

I work as a librarian. I have parents come up to me all the time with their child, puff themselves up, and loudly announce, "This is our little treasure, Emily. She is only in the first grade, but she reads at a high school level. She already finished 'War and Peace' and has read the complete works of Shakespeare, but can you please suggest something challenging for her that has age-appropriate content? She is just SO precocious."

It's gross when parents do that. It makes me cringe. Your comments make me feel the same way. Please get over yourself.

I'd suggest that you read Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style." He's a cunning linguist (I mean that literally), and his book is all about how to make sentences that are intelligible. He gives examples. He shows you how to diagram a sentence and explains how readers' brains interpret a sentence. If you are Doing It Right, your readers won't feel overloaded or overwhelmed when they read your stories.

It's a lazy writer who creates prose that wears the reader out and makes her feel stupid. It's an arrogant, insufferable writer who believes that if the reader struggles, that's her own damn fault for being a "below-average" reader.

Your readers don't need remedial erotica. You need to give up trying to appear clever and do the hard work of writing clean prose.